Border Death-Trap

Time to Tear Down
America's Berlin Wall

by Joseph Nevins

July 31, 2002

This
month, a terrible milestone was reached in America: Since 1995, 2,000 would-be migrants
died trying to cross our southern border. The toll -- one corpse per border
mile, or one per 1.4 days -- is the predictable outcome of great disparities in
wealth, our hunger for cheap labor and border enforcement policies that push
migrants toward Southwestern deserts.

The U.S.
Border Patrol recently recovered four bodies outside the town of Ocotillo in
the scorched desert of California's southern border region. On the same day,
the Imperial County coroner removed a corpse from an irrigation canal near
Calexico to the east. And over the previous weekend, U.S. authorities found
five more bodies in western Arizona. All of the deceased were from Mexico, part
of an ever-growing death toll among migrants crossing the U.S. boundary without
authorization.

These
fatalities helped the United States reach an ignominious milestone during July:
2,000 dead migrants along the southern divide since 1995, soon after Washington
began to significantly enhance boundary policing. That's roughly one corpse per
border mile, or one per 1.4 days. Just as the deaths of would-be migrants
trying to overcome the Berlin Wall led to outrage and calls for the militarized
line of control to come down, moral and political consistency requires a
similar response to the ever-deadly U.S.-Mexico boundary.

When
Washington, D.C., began its "territorial denial" strategy in the
mid-1990s, officials predicted that it would discourage many migrants from
crossing by pushing them away from border cities and towns into harsh mountain
and desert areas where they would rationally decide to forgo the risks and
return home. These predictions soon proved false, as the number of fatalities
-- largely from exposure to the elements and drowning -- rose dramatically.

Denying any
responsibility for the deaths, U.S. officials' typical response has been one of
hand wringing, or outrage directed at the "coyotes" -- smugglers
whose services are made more necessary by the very boundary build-up championed
by these same officials. More proactively, officials promised increased search
and rescue efforts.

Yet, June was
the deadliest month on record, with 70 migrants perishing, including two girls,
11 and 12. And over the last year, the death toll in proportion to the number of
migrant apprehensions -- a rough indicator of the actual migrant flow -- has
actually risen.

Such numbers
and the human suffering they embody demonstrate there is nothing surprising
about the fatalities. They are the predictable outcome of a lethal, predictable
charade, one in which Washington provides ever-increasing amounts of boundary
enforcement resources in full knowledge that they will do little to diminish
unauthorized immigration, but will instead have increasingly deadly
consequences.

A report last
August from the General Accounting Office found "no clear indication"
that unauthorized crossings along the Southwest boundary have declined since
1994. An in-depth study released recently by the Public Policy Institute of
California confirms this, while attributing the rise in migrant deaths to
enhanced boundary enforcement.

Growing
socioeconomic ties and widening inequality between the United States and Mexico
(and increasingly beyond) -- combined with the will of migrants to escape
poverty and to pursue their basic human right to work, maintain their families
and have an adequate standard of living -- make unauthorized migration
inevitable.

The Bush
administration's proposed increase of $1.2 billion for immigration enforcement
will do nothing to change this. To pretend and behave otherwise is to
effectively sentence hundreds of migrants to death each year.

For such
reasons, America's border policy must change. This does not mean the end of the
U.S.-Mexico boundary, but the nature of it. Only by recognizing the
inevitability of immigration and welcoming -- rather trying to repel
--immigrants can we stop the deaths. At the same time, putting an end to U.S.
policies abroad that contribute to political-economic instability and injustice
would prove to be far more effective, in addition to more humane in diminishing
immigration that is unwanted -- at least officially.

American
capital has long had a voracious appetite for highly exploitable labor, thus
attracting "illegal" immigrants, whose presence is widely accepted at
the highest levels of society. Moreover, Washington has aggressively pushed the
liberalization of foreign economies such as Mexico's, a process that has
predictably intensified migratory pressures among those displaced in the name
of economic efficiency.

U.S. officials
are not deliberately killing migrants. But they have helped to drive migrants
here, and created and maintained an enforcement apparatus that inevitably
results in their deaths -- in numbers far greater than occurred in East
Germany. Its time to tear down America's Berlin Wall.